The Groveland Hotel: Adobe in the Gold Rush

The Groveland Hotel on Main Street is the oldest surviving building in town, an adobe structure that dates to the gold rush. The original portion was built around eighteen fifty, when Groveland was still called Garrote and the foothills were full of men looking for placer gold in the creek beds. Adobe construction was unusual in the Sierra foothills, where most buildings went up in wood and burned with depressing frequency.

The stone and adobe structure survived when wood buildings around it did not. A Victorian addition was built around nineteen fifteen, and here the building's history becomes entangled with the construction of the Hetch Hetchy Dam twenty miles to the east. The addition was built specifically to house the San Francisco city engineers and officials who were overseeing the dam project.

For the better part of a decade, the men who authorized the drowning of Hetch Hetchy Valley slept in the rooms above Main Street in Groveland. The hotel is on the National Register of Historic Places and still operates as an inn today. It is said to be haunted by a gold rush miner named Lyle who died in what is now room fifteen and has been reported by guests as a quiet, benign presence who occasionally moves objects around the room.

Whether or not you believe in Lyle, the building itself is a genuine document of two distinct eras: the gold rush that created the town and the dam project that changed the mountains behind it.